A prototype system for rapid application development using dynamically reconfigurable hardware

This paper explores ways of enhancing the power of computational systems using dynamically reconfigurable hardware. The overall goal is to create an environment that enables the user, not necessarily a hardware-oriented person, to interactively construct and evaluate different solutions. The emphasis is on rapid development, so that new ideas can be evaluated quickly. In our system, the dynamically reconfigurable hardware acts as a co-processor. Therefore it is important to integrate its operations (both computations and reconfigurations) closely with the rest of the application, even when the sequence of reconfiguration operations depends on the application's actual execution path.